Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] How do you get found in a place as vast as the Internet? Google is really where people go to find things and you want to make sure you are found by the people who are looking for the thing that you have, the thing that you do really well. Two episodes ago, we talked all about how to optimize your website, right? The best practices for building a website that is an extension of your brick and mortar business, but a website that converts, that drives traffic and revenue to. Today we're going to talk about how that fits in with the grander scheme of things because we're going to talk about SEO, why SEO is so crucial and an easy way for you to think about it. If you think this is like really something you don't have to worry about or something someone else will take care of, you're totally wrong. This is something you have to be aware of and there are very simple steps you can take to make sure that you pop that you are found on a place on a site like Google. How do you get found on a place as vast as the Internet? That's what today's episode is all about. Don't go anywhere. There's an old saying that goes something like this. You'll only find three kinds of people in the world. Those who see, those who will never see, and those who can see when shown. This is Restaurant Strategy, a podcast with answers for anyone who's looking.
[00:01:28] Hey everyone, thanks for tuning in. My name is Chip Close. This is Restaurant Strategy, a podcast dedicated solely to helping you build a more profitable and sustainable business. Real quick, talking all about SEO. On today's episode, we're going to talk about reputation management, how important it is to get reviews and respond to those reviews. So I'm going to use that to talk about reviews. If you get any sort of value from this show, I want you to pause in just 30 seconds and do me a quick favorite. I want you to go to Apple Podcasts and leave me a five star rating and review. Just go let people know what you get out of the show, what you've gotten out of the show, why you think they should listen to the show, that will help us grow this community, that will help boost me in the rankings, which helps again, you know, increase downloads. And the more people we have listening, the more cool stuff we can do. This company has grown like crazy because this podcast has grown like crazy over the last six years. So pause it right now. Go to Apple Podcasts, leave me a five star rating and review again. Just let the world know why you tune in and why you think they should tune in. That more than anything would help my small business.
[00:02:33] What's the food cost for your third best selling entree? You don't know? With Margin Edge you could know instantly. Margin Edge is a complete restaurant management software that I like to recommend to all of the P3 members, all the clients I work with. Why? Because. Because it helps them improve profitability. With Margin Edge, you just get to snap pictures of your invoices as they come in and you get real time data in every area of your business. You can see plate costs in real time. You get daily P&LS. Your inventory count sheets are automatically updated. It saves you a ton of time and lets you make informed decisions. So I got a client, P3 member, gather brewing down outside of San Antonio. They started using Margin Edge a month after they joined my program. And within one month of them bringing on Margin Edge, their food costs went from 38% to 28%. It was incredible savings. That's 10 points that drop straight to the bottom line. There's a reason I recommend Margin Edge to so many of the P3 members. It's because I know it works. If you're interested in learning more or you want to see how Gather brewing went from 38% to 28% food costs, head over to margin edge.com chip. There's an incredible video there that talks about their story, talks about their journey with the Plat platform. Again, margin edge.com chip. See a really great. See a really great story about the folks at. At Gather Brewing. Go do that now. Of course, that link is in the show notes.
[00:04:00] Okay, so again, two episodes ago we were talking about the importance of your restaurant's website. Yes, you need a website. Yes, it needs to be optimized. It needs to be able to convert the users who go to visit. For the most part, restaurant websites exist for one or two reasons. To start an online order or to help people make a reservation. That's pretty much it with maybe a couple of exceptions, but those are the needs to be dialed in for conversion. So now a website is part of a larger fabric, Right? We talk about SEO, Search Engine optimization. It's a fancy word of saying how to get found on Google. So number one website in the world is Google. Number two website in the world is YouTube, which is by the way owned by Google. So they are a massive player when it comes to search. When it comes to restaurant SEO, there are four areas that I want to focus in on. Number one, local SEO. Number two, how to optimize Your website, we're going to dive in a little bit more technically. Number three, the importance of reputation management. Number four, content. All of us, we're going to break down, we're going to make it very easy to understand, but search engine, right? Google is a search engine. Bing is a search engine. Google is what we're going to focus on because it's the biggest in the world. It's the number one website in the world. YouTube is number two. Owned by Google. Right? Optimization, meaning how do we make the most of it? How do we get found by the people who are looking for us? That becomes really crucial. So, told you four areas we're going to talk about the importance of local SEO, how we optimize our website. We're going to go a little bit deeper into the technical side of things, talk about reputation management and content marketing. Before we go any further, when we talk about Google, there are three main sections of Google. There's paid search, there's a local search and there's organic search. For the most part, all you care about as a brick and mortar business, as a small business is paid search and local search. Now, paid search literally is when you run an ad. When you run a Google Ad, which by the way, that should be your first dollars you spend on your marketing should be on Google Ads. 5 to $10 a day for the most part, will help you immensely. And when you watch it working, meaning when you get your cost per click CPC below 50 cents, you start, you slowly start raising your budget, right? Eventually it will stop working. There'll be the law of diminishing returns. But you go from $5 a day to 10 and 10 to 12 and 12 to 15, 15 to 20. And eventually maybe at like 30 or 50 or $100 a day, you'll see it stop working or it won't be working as well. And then you bring the budget back. That's search engine monetization. That's a whole other conversation. But when we talk about Google, the platform, there's paid search, which is people who pay to have their ad shown above everything else at the top of the page. Then there's local search, which is usually the next section. Sometimes we call that the three pack or the map pack. So it's usually where you say best seafood restaurant near me, right? And then you see a map and then usually there's three results there, right? And then if you click see more, you'll show the map and a whole bunch of options. That's local search, which is incredibly helpful for us. And Then the next one down below is organic search. And for restaurants, it's just not as important. Number one, it's so far down the page that most people are already drawn to the pictures and the map feature that they don't go any further.
[00:07:28] But it's also really hard to rank organically against massive, massive content sites which get much more traffic like eater or OpenTable or Yelp or the New York Times or whatever it is. So paid search, local search, organic search. For the purpose of this conversation, you sort of need to forget all about organic search, right? And paid, meaning SEM, search engine monetization is a whole other conversation. So really what we're talking about is how do we win at local search and talked about here, right? The first section we're going to talk about is why local SEO is so crucial. You have to be optimized for near me searches, right? So restaurants need to be easily found by the people who are searching for food nearby, people who run near me searches, right? There's like an 86% success rate that they will visit one of the restaurants that they find within the next 60 minutes. So being found in searches like that is incredibly, incredibly helpful. One of the best things you can do is you can claim your Google my business profile or your Google my business page, right? Your Google, your Google business profile is the center of your Google universe. I'm going to guess that 99% of you have claimed this. If this is news to anyone, it's Google, right? Or it's business.google.com literally, that's the website business.google.com, go claim your page.
[00:08:55] It probably already exists. You just need to claim it so you can update it, so you can add photos and update the information and all of that, right?
[00:09:02] So you have to optimize for near me searches. You have to own that Google business profile, that Google my business page. You have to make sure all of your information is key, local keywords, right? You want to focus and you want to think about, hey, what are people searching for? When I got a taco shop, what do you think they're putting in there? They're going to the search bar and they're saying, best tacos near me. Best Mexican restaurant by me. Best Tex Mex near me. Best flautas near me. They're putting in. There's any number 50 or 100 different keywords they're putting in. When they're trying to basically get to you, they just don't know you yet.
[00:09:38] So you got to really think deeply about what words they're looking for. Now we're going to come back to that because when we talk about website optimization, we're going to talk about how you put keywords on your website, but that becomes key. It becomes key to have that on your Google business page in the description of you, in the menu that you upload there or the menus that you, that you fill in there. Make sure to put the words that you know people are looking for. And then finally, the last thing I want to talk about in this section is citations. This citations are your information we used to call NAP credentials. Name, address, phone number, NAP name, address, phone number. Crucial for restaurants. It's also hours and menus. Napm is what they call it. Name, address, phone number, hours and menu is crucial. Now I always talk about Marquee. Marquee is a sponsor of this podcast. It's something that I recommend to all of my P3 members because what they do is listings management. The thing is, there are 80 some listings sites and growing across the Internet and you probably know five of them. There are probably Google, Bing, City Search, Yelp, Facebook, Foursquare, I don't know, that's like six. And there are like 78 others that you are being listed on that you just don't know of. So by using a tool like Marquee M A R Q I I, you update all your information in there. Your name, address, phone number, hours, menu, and it shoots it out across the entire Internet. If there are any unclaimed pages on City Search or Foursquare or Bing, it claims those for you and it updates everything so you don't have to go in and log into 84 places. You just do it in one place. And guess what? That's really crucial because Google, Google has these things like they call them the Googlebots or the Google Crawlers, the Google Crawlers. Think of them like a whole bunch of spiders that crawl across the entire Internet and send information back to the mothership. Google is the mothership. So what it's doing is it's crawling all over and sending information back. When it goes to Google and Bing and Foursquare and Facebook and Yelp and 17 other sites you've never heard of. And it sends back conflicting information. It affects your trustability.
[00:11:55] And see, that becomes really important because what Google is in the business of, here's the cool thing about Google, they want what we want. Google is in the business of returning relevant search results. So if somebody says best tacos near me, they're not just going to return any Tacos, they're going to return the best tacos, meaning the well reviewed, the heavily trafficked, the sites that have legacy, meaning that have been there.
[00:12:23] If there's a taco place that's been around for six months and one that's been around for six years, six years, has more trustability. Because Google says correctly or incorrectly, they say, well, I don't know man, they've been there for a while. Must be some reason why they're still here.
[00:12:37] When they get higher rating, like, well, more people like them. Must be for some reason. They get more reviews, well, they must get more traffic. They must get more people in there.
[00:12:47] When two restaurants have 4.5 rating, but one is 80 reviews, one is 800 views, they go, well, 4.5 rating, but like 10 times as many people gave them that 4, 4.5 rating. So that probably means something. Whether it's right or not. That's how Google. Google has criteria and they have to make some determinations.
[00:13:07] That becomes really crucial. So when it comes to local SEO, it's optimizing for near me searches, it's grabbing your Google business profile, it's focusing on keywords that matter to the people in your area, and then your citations, your listings marquee is an incredibly powerful tool for that.
[00:13:25] Next we go to website optimization, right? Number one, you got to focus on having a great mobile experience, right? Most searches, if you go into your, you know, your Google business profile or you go into your Google Analytics page, you'll see the majority of your traffic. I say more than 60% is probably coming from mobile. So you have to think mobile first. Mobile first means that it's designed on for mobile, and then secondarily we make it work on desktop. That's what mobile first means. Not that, yeah, it looks okay on mobile, but we thought about the mobile experience before we thought about the desktop experience. And that's a weird thing to think about, but it's absolutely true. Unless you are the strange snowflake and your data tells you that 80% of your traffic comes from desktop, then cool, you can go desktop first. But I think you're gonna find over 60% of your traffic comes to you from mobile. So you have to go mobile first. You have to think about page speed, right? So lots of videos and photos and all that need to be optimized so that your, your site loads quickly. It takes a long time to load. Number one, people don't have patience. Number two, Google sees that and they're like, oh, might be a sort of a janky Website, maybe we don't trust it, right? Content is crucial and this is where your keywords come in. If you are famous for your buttermilk pancakes, if you are famous for your margarita selections or whatever, you have to make sure to put that in there, right? Restaurant XYZ is a traditional Mexican restaurant serving blah blah blah blah blah, specializing in our flavored margaritas. If you specialize in flavored margaritas and that's what people come for, then make sure to talk about it.
[00:15:01] Also, keeping your menus updated on your website is crucial because there are keywords there. Now listen, no JPEGs, no PDFs. You do not put images on your website. It needs HTML, meaning the text actually has to get typed in to your website. I can't impress upon you how crucial that is. And that's because Google can't read pixels. So if you put an image like a PDF of your menu, the Google crawlers crawl over the menu and they say pixels. That's what they tell the mothership. There are pixels on this menu page.
[00:15:34] One thing that's really crucial is that on your menu page there's a headline that says menu. That the website says restaurantxyz.com menu.
[00:15:44] So it says menu, it has the menu and the slug. The URL slug is the slash, whatever. So restaurantxyz.com menu, all of those being in alignment is crucial. If it's the hours and location, same thing. The headline says hours and location. The information below has your hours and location.
[00:16:05] And then in the URL it's restaurantxyz.com hoursandlocation.
[00:16:12] Make those all match, it will help you immensely.
[00:16:17] And again put those keywords in there all over your website. Right? That's what your content is all about.
[00:16:24] Crucial. All right, so we want to talk about reputation management and I want to go further into the content in just a minute after a word from some more of our sponsors.
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[00:18:31] Okay, so now we're talking about SEO for restaurants. Talked about the importance of local SEO. That's what we're trying to own. We talked about how your website now fits in to local search. Now I want to talk about the importance of reputation management. Reputation management is the the online reviews. Mostly we're talking about Google and Yelp. Those are the two biggest review websites. You have to get more reviews, better reviews, and you must respond to reviews. Now listen, here's something that's really crucial.
[00:19:02] You cannot pay for these reviews. They can't be a quid pro quo. Hey, will you leave us a review? We'll take $5 off your check. Absolutely not. In fact, you will get dinged, you'll get in trouble, and you risk having your entire page ripped down from Google or Yelp or TripAdvisor. We don't do it. What you can do is simply ask people. You can encourage reviews. What I like to recommend is we find the people in our dining room that are already having a great time. So rather than asking everybody, rather than having your servers walk up like robots and making sure everybody leaves reviews, just find the people who are loving, loving, loving it and go up to them and say, hey guys, it looks like you're loving it tonight. Did you guys have a good time? And of course they're gonna say, oh my God, yeah, it was so good. The martini was so good. Oh my God, the steak. They're going to rave. And you say, that's amazing. I'm so glad you had a good time. Can you do me a Favor online reviews really impact our business. Can you take two minutes right now and just let the world know what you just told me? I'm going to leave a card here that directs you to the Yelp page and our Google my business page. If you can just literally share what you just shared with me, that I would be incredibly helpful. I'll be back in two minutes to make sure you did it and you walk away and you come back really genially like, hey, guys, just wanted to make sure. Were you able to do that? I'm telling you, this thing works. Or if you're in a fast, casual setting, I like to use a tool like Ovation to help you get more feedback and to encourage more reviews. That's a tool that actually works, right? So there's a way to do it, There's a way to encourage reviews, get more good reviews, and then you have to, have to, have to respond to every single review. Now, Marquee, which I talked about as a listings management tool, is also a reputation management tool, right? So if they're managing your listings and a tool like Ovation is helping you get more reviews, or you're going and, and asking for more reviews, then you need a way to aggregate all your reviews in one place. Because maybe you're on Foursquare and Facebook and TripAdvisor and Yelp and Google. Rather than logging into each of those places three times a week, just have them aggregate into one spot. You'll get notified every time there's a review. And a tool like Marquee also has an AI component where they'll just respond for you, or they can craft the review the responses for you, and you can then approve them or edit them and hit submit. So there's a way to do this a lot more effectively and a lot more efficiently. Bottom line is, though, you need to do it not just for the great reviews, not just for the bad reviews, even the stuff in the middle, everything. One star, two star, three star, four star, five star reviews. You need more reviews and you need to respond to every single one. It's crucial. Finally then, the last area I want to talk about today is content marketing, right? So now we talked about keywords. One of the best ways to do this, right? One of the things we're also looking for, I'll say, is we're looking for more traffic back to your website. So the power of social media, right, is that, yeah, people find you there, whatever, etc, etc. Usually social media isn't about discoverability. Usually social media is about Confirming something that they already heard or something that they want to believe, right? So people say, oh, I went to this great restaurant the other night and said, I've never heard of it, let me go check it out. And they go and try and find it on Instagram. That's usually how social media fits in to the customer journey. But what can be really helpful is that it creates backlinks. It's driving traffic to your website, which is another factor that Google uses to determine trustability. Again, relevance. It all comes back to that. So having a great website that moves people around, that converts, that gets people to take action on the website is good. Having more channels that drive traffic to your website is good. So YouTube driving traffic and Facebook and Instagram and TikTok and Yelp and TripAdvisor, all of that. Sending traffic to your website is helpful and will help your SEO.
[00:23:00] Reviews. Being on listings, right? Like, like, like listicles, being on sites like Eater or Infatuation or your local newspapers, all of that. Being on the, the local news, all of that. Last thing I want to say, this is a little bit outdated, but I still like it. Utilizing a blog, because a blog gets updated every week and what happens is that it shows Google, like, this website is alive, number one. It's free content. You're able to like, push out to your audience. It's a way to provide value to your people, to talk about the new menu, to talk about a new cocktail, to talk about your new chef, to introduce, you know, a staff highlight. There's ways to utilize a blog to showcase what you do, to toot your horn, tell your story, but from a just a technical perspective, it keeps the site alive. And that I find is very, very helpful. So we don't talk about it as much. I certainly used to talk about it a lot the first year or two of the podcast. I don't talk about it that much, but I still like it. It still very much works.
[00:24:00] That's it. Those are the four areas I want to talk about when it comes to SEO. Not that I'm trying to teach you everything about SEO because it's highly, very, very highly technical, but what I want to do is I want to make this. I want to make this easy to digest and easy to take action on, right? So when it comes to local search, optimizing your Google my business page, using a tool like Marquee to manage all your listings will help you managing the website. Optimizing that website in those key ways we talked about is crucial. Staying on top of reputation Management, meaning getting more reviews, getting more good reviews and responding to all the reviews will help you from an SEO perspective. And finally this content marketing. Utilizing all your channels to drive traffic back, putting keywords on your website and again, not stuffing your website with keywords, but making sure to keep, you know, to, to talk about the words that you know, people are searching for. Utilizing a blog feature on there. All of this will help you. And it seems, if it seems like a lot, it's not. It's probably 15 to 20 minutes every single week. It's 15 to 20 minutes work that you could probably outsource or delegate to somebody that can keep track of all this. In any event, I appreciate you guys. In the spirit of, of asking for reviews, I'm going to ask you for reviews. If you get any sort of value from this show, please take two minutes. Go leave us five star rating and review on Apple podcasts. If you like the show, if you get stuff out of the show, just go let people know why you like it and why you think they should tune in. That more than anything will help me. Thank you very much again, my name is Chip Close. This is the Restaurant Strategy podcast. I appreciate you guys. I will see you next time.
